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When medical anthropology coalesced in the 1960s, it was as a “practice discipline” (Good 1994, p. 4) dedicated to the service of improving public health in economically poor nations. Indeed, initial effort at organizing a medical anthropology interest group in the USA – diligently fostered by Hazel Weidman – resulted in a 1968 invitation from the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) to affiliate (Weidman 1986). The fledgling community, then called the Group for Medical Anthropology (GMA), accepted this invitation as a practical solution to the challenges of maintaining cohesion, but it was “something of an embarrassment” to many (Good 1994, p. 4). Even George Foster, a key founding figure, reported having to work through ambivalences: “We were trained to despise applied anthropology” (Foster 2000, quoted in Kemper 2006).

As Scotch reported, at the time many felt that because of its practical bent “the quality of literature in [medical anthropology] is not always impressive… It is superficial, impressionistic, and nontheoretical” (1963, p. 32): wholly infra dig. Some felt that its practitioners were “less rigorous than their more traditional-minded contemporaries” (p. 33) and denigrated them as mere “technicians” (p. 42). In the UK, this stigma was worse (Kaufert and Kaufert 1978): a British Medical Anthropology Society did form in 1976, but it served mostly medical doctors (Dingwall 1980).